Author: Robert Wringham

A local cat called Monty disappeared this week to much consternation.

When I saw the MISSING poster reporting that he’d been CATNAPPED no less, my heart sank in part for the cat but also for myself. Being a bit silly about cats in general and fond of this one in particular, I just knew I’d end up trawling the neighborhood at night, hollering “Monty! Monty!” like the bargain basement Jon Ronson I so clearly am.

As I rounded the corner, I saw some people in line at a bus stop. They were laughing. “How could they be so callous?!” I thought, “How could anyone laugh on a day like this, when Monty has been seized?!” Some lunatic out there was feasting upon his bones or — worse — dressing him up in little ribbons and making him dance. I for one wouldn’t be laughing again. I’d wear a black armband, I decided, until he turned up.

But then I saw what they were laughing at. They were laughing at Monty, who was sitting in his usual spot, surrounded by his own MISSING posters.

I stopped, hands on hips, and looked down at him. God help me, I think I might actually have expected an explanation.

He gave me his usual coquettish “meow” as if nothing odd had happened at all, the little bastard.

I’m awfully fond of Monty. I see him almost every day and the only times I don’t stop to fuss him behind the ears is if someone’s already there and fussing him behind the ears.

He has an excellent personality. His way is to sit on the ornamental beer barrel outside a local bar, simply waiting for the attention of passersby. He gets an awful lot of it too, from neighbours, shop workers, commuters and school children.

Clearly, the secret of a successful cat is foot traffic.

The other secret must be social media presence; later in the day, I checked Twitter to see if I might learn what had happened to warrant the MISSING posters. Twitter had been momentarily in uproar at reports of his being catnapped. There were people in Australia tweeting about him. I also learned that the little prick has two different Facebook pages. One for friends and one for fans.

He’s even on Google Streetview. Well, he would be wouldn’t he? Anyone can get on Streetview if they’re committed and consistent enough, though it should be noted that Google didn’t see fit to blur Monty’s face, so winning is his personality.

Anyway, from what I could gather, he’d been taken off by someone who’d mistaken him for a stray, but who had then returned him when she’d spotted the posters and understood her mistake.

Strangely, I can see how this would happen. I’m not saying he brought it on himself–no cat victim blaming here–but Monty has a certain charisma and it’s easy to feel bit drunk when he’s around. He’s also quite docile himself and I’m certain he’d have been perfectly amenable to being lifted by a stranger and stuffed into a box. Look, we’ve all been there.

He’d been returned some hours before I came along and saw the MISSING posters so I only had to worry about his fate and mine (“Monty! Monty!” — I mean, my God, that’s no dignified activity for a tall man) for the time it takes to walk one block and gnaw just two fingernails to the hilt.

I wonder what he thinks about it all now? Does he remember his little jaunt? Does he have any stance on this unusual chain of events whatsoever? I’ve been trying to gauge any change in his mood but he just seems to be his usual old self, reluctant to follow my finger or answer any questions.

I’m glad he wasn’t away long.

Waking in fright this morning, I found that a very special bulb had lit itself on the control desk inside my head. It was the one labelled “Alka-Selzer.”

“Yes,” I thought, running an exploratory tongue over furry teeth, “Alaka-Selzer. Don’t worry, Head, I’ve got this.”

But I didn’t. I didn’t have “this.” I didn’t have anything. And last time I checked, “anything” included Alka-Seltzer.

I cursed my lack of foresight. How had I discounted the future so completely? Had I really believed last time that I’d learned my lesson?

Note to self: You never learn your lesson! That’s the one thing you know for sure about yourself. Also, you’re fond of jam.

Why hadn’t I stocked up on Alka-Seltzer? It’s like that time I threw all of my shoes away after deciding “once and for all” that life is better spent indoors.

Woe, woe, all is woe. I couldn’t even slither down to the cornershop or squint my way along to the pharmacy because I knew I’d be fobbed off with some awful pill. Alka-Seltzer, once a staple of any degenerate’s bathroom cabinet, is weirdly difficult to get these days.

There was a time — 1955 probably — when the plink-plink was the go-to throbber relief for almost any recidivist wastrel you’d care to name; Hemingway, Vonnegut, Elizabeth Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant — they all knew. Buzz Aldrin had a special flap built into his spacesuit just for the plinky. (I don’t know that for certain but it doesn’t feel libellous.)

But the fifties and sixties were more stylish times. Everything today is about efficiency, solving a problem so you can get back to your miserable work and never have a sick day. Nobody wants to truly enjoy an illness anymore, to luxuriate in soupy wretchedness.

I don’t want to swallow a pill, dammit. I want Alka-Seltzer! Someone get me an Alka-Seltzer before I tear this town to pieces!

Now look, I know what you’re thinking, madam, and I agree that I’ve said “Alka-Seltzer” an awful lot in this post, but this is not sponsored content. Having said that, the good people at Bayer Pharmaceuticals could certainly do worse than “Someone get me an Alka-Seltzer before I tear this town to pieces!” as a catchy marketing slogan. Get in touch, Big Pharma, if you’re interested. I am willing to be an enthusiastic brand ambassador for… well, I’m not going to say it again for free.

“Oh! for an Alka-Seltzer,” I thought, “I’d give my wife’s left kidney for an Alka-Seltzer.”

But wait. Didn’t I see a boxload of Alka-Seltzer at the pound shop recently? And was it not the case that I couldn’t believe my eyes and bought a fiver’s worth? Was I not thinking forward to just such an emergency as this morning and the next fifty or so this mornings? Did that happen?

It did?!

What took place next involved a drawer, some rifling, and the word “hooray!” but I’ll leave it to you to fill in the blanks.

I half-filled a weighty-bottomed highball with cold water, tore the little blue packet down the middle in what felt like an emergency field attempt at separating Siamese twins, and gaily flipped the tablets from a couple of feet away, one after the other — plink!™ plink!™ — into the water.

They fizzed and foamed immediately, as is their wonderful wont, and I knocked it back. It may be my imagination, madam, but I’m fairly certain the sun began to shine and a little bird somewhere began to sing.

An Alka-Seltzer tablet really is a design classic, you know. I’m always surprised by how skinny they happen to be and how perfect these proportions are. In my memory they always seem as fat as a rubber bath plug — perhaps an exaggeration suggested by their efficacy — but in fact they’re very slender discs like something you’d bet with or push into a meter, and they have a slightly thicker edge like a shirt button, and the brand is embossed into them. You can just imagine the machine that presses them. It’s probably a Big Bertha of a machine and entirely automated, but I like to think that a person in overalls or a cheerful octopus pulls that embossing lever, happy in the knowledge that her work will save many writers’ lives.

A spiritual miser would say that none of an Alka-Seltzer’s aesthetic beauty is strictly necessary. I daresay they could scrap the embossing and whatnot to save on costs, but they don’t and I think that’s neat. There’s no twenty-first-century skinflintery about Alka-Seltzer and that is why they’re ace.

Also they cure hangovers.

*

My legal adviser (who may or may not be this guy) would like me to point out that Mr Buzz Aldrin was never inebriated or hungover while on the moon and also that “on the moon” does not in any way ever mean “drunk”. Now, to distract everyone, here’s Buster:

At last! They’re gone!

I’d been carrying a pair of old pound coins around for the best part of nine months. I’d open my wallet and there they’d be, peeping back at me like the eyes of a small cat.

The problem was that none of my regular journeys take me anywhere near a bank during working hours to get the bloody things exchanged. I could have gone out on a special mission to solve this problem, but that would have meant a tedious Shire-to-Mount-Doom walking saga or a £1.20 subway ticket, reducing the net gain to 80p.

Say what you like about Robert Wringham but he doesn’t get out of bed for that kind of money. Or any other kind of money, admittedly.

I’d have to wait to chance upon an open bank and then pounce. But after nine months, I was beginning to think I’d have to carry these coins forever and that they’d end up weighing my eyelids down when I languish in my coffin.

Knowing my luck, I’d arrive on the banks of the Styx, proffering my coins to the boatman only to be told, “sorry mate, I can’t accept these.”

Lamenting the situation in the pub one night, Spencer offered to buy my two pound coins for £1. Well, he’d love that wouldn’t he? I’d sooner sling them into a field.

Originally, the problem was not mine but my wife’s. They sat on her bedside table for a couple of months until I decided, completely irrationally, to make them my business. I gave her a pair of new, spendable coins in exchange and vowed to get rid of the old ones somehow.

Now here I am. Weighed down by this crappy shrapnel. And a riddle.

The supermarkets won’t take them, the nation’s vending machines were adapted far too efficiently for my liking, and I’m too decent to hoodwink a tramp.

Whenever I have this sort of practical problem, my dad is the person to whom I naturally go for advice, though I don’t for the life of me know why. It must be some sort of evolutionary vestige or an unconscious idea that mustaches are good in a crisis.

You know what my dad told me? He said that supermarket trolleys still accept them.

Yes, I said, but then the trolley gives you them back. I suppose I could just abandon the coins in the trolley slots but then we’re essentially back to slinging them into a field aren’t we?

It crossed my mind that the “all currencies” charity box at the airport might be a good place to dispose of them. It’s one of those charity boxes where your coin spirals around on its side for a minute before plunging with a satisfying thud into a central abyss. At least then I’d have the pleasure of watching the coins roll around and around into the vortex of hopeless causes.

And that’s exactly what I’d have done if only I’d remembered to actually do it when we went to Paris via the airport in March. Instead, the two coins came all the way to France in my wallet, yes, and all the way back like a couple of pointless hitch-hikers. They probably cost the world their weight in airplane fuel.

Besides, the “all currencies” charity box welcomes legal currencies from anywhere in the world, not expired currencies. It would welcome the six-foot diameter of a Rey Stone, apparently, before these useless tokens-of-nothing.

Trying to look casual on Perth High Street this week, my mind drifted in the direction of the feckless coins and how, in a last-ditch attempt to do something useful with them, I could use them as a joke competition prize for the Patreon gang (“the two coins go to the first patron to send me the £1.99 shipping costs”) when suddenly, like an oasis in the desert, I spotted an HSBC. No mirage, I went inside and the clerk exchanged my coins.

I could not believe my luck. He didn’t even sigh or tell me to go fuck myself. The shitcoins are gone. Gone! Success!

Last night, suddenly remembering the sorcery of fungibility, I exchanged the two new pounds along with three of their fellows for a pint of beer, successfully converting so much shrapnel into a pleasantly dizzy feeling and a bladder full of wee. Economics is magic.

Lovely! It’s a bit of the old whatchamacallit. You know, the old anti-sad.

Sunshine. That’s the one.

Yes, the sun is out for springtime and everybody I see on the street is wearing a pair of stylish sunglasses as if it doesn’t mean a thing. Let me tell you, a Scottish person in sunglasses is quite a sight. They act all nonchalant as if it were perfectly normal to look like a million bucks.

Given a pair of sunglasses, we swagger around with a Ray Charlesish sort of vibe, trying to give them impression that we’ve never so much as heard of a wind-blasted, barnacled northern/Scandie promontory let alone ate our every breakfast on one.

Personally, I ditched my sunglasses long ago as part of my minimalist credo. This means that when the sun finally shines, everyone says to me “Aha, Mr. Minimalist, I bet you wish you had a nice pair of Ray-Bans now don’t you?! Eh? Eh? Eh-eh-eh?” To which, I say, “Not really, for I have the gift of the squint!”

And then I give them the squinting of a lifetime.

Look, we only get about ten days of sunshine in a Scottish year, meaning about fifteen Scottish hours of actual Scottish exposure to it. Plus, when the sun finally shines in late April and you get your sunglasses out of the drawer — the drawer in which you also keep such treasures as the yellow Ikea AA batteries, your cuff links, and the expired condoms — you have to blow the dust off their case, an act which makes you feel like an Eminent Victorian.

That’s no way to start a nice spring day is it? Lytton Strachey, get back in your box where you belong until October. Thank you.

I saw a chap riding around in a soft-top car with the hood down this morning too. I bet he just drives around and around for as long as the sunshine lasts. I know that’s what I’d do. The rest of the year, that soft roof is just a place for his cat to sleep.

*

Anyway, this is all by way of saying how nice it is come out of the shadows for a while and enjoy the odd pootle along the banks of the River Kelvin, often with a friend or two.

It has been quite the business, these warm little strolls. One such walk this week was with my friend Ian and it was quite eventful inasmuch as it allows me to write the following words:

“Dear Diary, I succeeded this week in making Ian laugh.”

Ian has been a comedian for 64 years (40 professionally) and he’s already thought of everything that could possibly be funny. It’s hard to surprise a person like that. You have to leap out like Kato when he least suspects it and, frankly, that’s just too much waiting around inside airing cupboards for my liking.

Besides, comedians aren’t often moved by jokes in the usual way. Comedians tend to look at jokes in the way normal people would look at a boiled egg.

There aren’t many boiled eggs with the kind of charisma that will garner much in the way of genuine human opprobrium. But it can happen.

So Ian and I were out for a walk, away from the hassles of life and the screaming, vertiginous horror of the blank page.

Suddenly, Ian spotted a penny on the ground and he stooped to pick it up.

“You don’t still pick up pennies do you?” I said, and geared up to tell him at length about my strict 5p policy, the exact ins and outs of which I’ll leave to your imagination (or a slow diary day).

“Well,” he said, rubbing the dirt off it with his thumb, “you know the phrase. Find a penny, pick it up…”

“…get AIDs,” I said.

That was it, folks. And you missed it. I know it’s not funny now, not here on the page. I know that. I’m not a complete idiot. But in the moment it was funny and it surprised Ian and it made him laugh. And he should fucking know, okay? He’s got something like a thousand stage hours under his belt. How many have you got? Twenty-seven minutes? I thought as much. Stick to your boiled eggs, madam.

Needless to say, I ran a victory lap around the park, waving my hands like an Olympic gold-medal winner. Rob’s joke. I savoured the words. “Rob’s joke.” It had to happen eventually, I suppose, but inevitability does not tarnish victory.

Anyway, this skin isn’t going to burn itself. Back out for a squint, I think.

We’ve been looking after Missy, my mum’s cat.

She’s getting on in years now — the cat, that is; Mummy’s the same age she’s always been — and her personality has changed since I first petted her tiny cat head.

Missy used to be a tremendously affectionate and cooperative cat, perfectly happy for you to pick her up and carry her around on your shoulder like a parrot.

Time was, you could even pop her on your head like a living fur hat and she’d stay there, content to grow fat on your loving brainwaves.

Now, in her advanced years, she’s developed a certain coolness. Though there are, of course, limits to one’s cool when one looks like a not-particularly-sophisticated glove puppet.

She succeeds, however, in a sort-of serious look. Where, once, you’d catch her eye and she’d come bounding into your lap like a little puppy, she now gives you a look of absolute pity. Its a look-to-kill that sits somewhere between the cultivated indifference of a High School Mean Girl and the icy contempt over half-moon glasses of an out-to-pasture librarian. “Look at you,” she says, “A human being. As if!”

Somehow, the glance reminds you that not so long ago you and your kind were swinging in the trees.

She gives off the impression that she knows that only one of us has ever eaten something out of a bin. As it happens, I have no memory of ever eating anything out of a bin, but one of us must have done and it certainly wasn’t her.

That’s an awful lot of glance language for someone who craps in a plastic tray.

The funniest thing is that she now feels that giving humans the time of day is clearly beneath her, she also still craves our affection. What this means in practice is that she no longer sits on your lap, but merely near to your lap.

Best of all, as I move around the apartment in the course of the day, Missy follows me but tries to give the impression that she’s not interested and doesn’t care. If I go to the kitchen, she’ll follow — but only after waiting an amount of time which she thinks is seemly.

Unfortunately for her, she’s on cat minutes so she impatiently arrives at my feet within a few seconds. She think she’s conveying nonchalance, but her performance is about as convincing as my father-in-law’s poker face.

A paying audience would throw tomatoes.

Of course, this prompts a whole new area of fun to be had. What I like to do now is rise from my chair, go into another room, and wait — stifling the giggles — for her inevitable arrival. I then pretend to change my mind (“no, on second thoughts I was in the right place first time”) and go back to where I was sitting originally.

There’s no way on Earth she can recover from the two-rooms maneuver with any dignity and, sure enough, she comes trotting in to sit near me again, the fuss-hungry fool.

“Oh, I thought you wanted to be in there,” I say, and she gives me one of her looks. I’m never quite sure if she knows she’s been duped, but she falls for it again and again. It’s hard to be clever, I suppose, when the space inside your skull is, like a steak bake, 60% eyes.

I’ve found other ways to have fun with Missy’s dignity act. I’ve long observed, for example, that she likes positive-sounding speech patterns and I’m able to please her with cooing noises and (“yes, that’s right!“) baby talk. She doesn’t seem to recognise words though so I call her a little thicko and my little fathead and things like that. So long as it’s all said in a positive tone, she adores it. This is funnier now that Missy has dignity. The joy is no longer in the pointless evil of insulting a baby who can’t understand and loves you blindly, but more like the insolent pleasure of insulting High Court Judge from the safety of a soundproof booth.

Oh, here she comes now. I can tell from her strut that she thinks she’s Herbie Hancock even though she looks like something you’d fail to win at a coconut shy. I love her completely.

One of my regular walks takes me through an alley which happens to have some truly top-drawer litter. You bet I’m going to tell you about it.

First, I should explain, it is not strictly an alley. Your classic Type-1 alley would have obscuring walls on each side. This alley has a mesh fence on one side and, on the other, a shoulder-height brick wall that stops everyone from falling into a railway cutting.

I’m not sure what exactly provides the illusion of alleyness but something does, as the amazing litter will testify. An alley’s ability to obscure you briefly from The Watchful Eyes promotes decadent ideas and, before you know it, things are falling off your person.

The scrubland beyond the mesh fence is the resting place, I’m not exaggerating, of hundreds of drained Buckfast bottles. The labels have been rinsed away by rain. It sparkles greenly.

When I told a friend about this Emerald City he said it was probably the work of people getting tanked up on their way to concerts at the nearby exhibition centre. I prefer to think it is the cumulative, daily effort of a single marauding bum. I can dream can’t I?

Still, my favourite litter feature must be the jeans. Two pairs of jeans — stonewashed denim, detail fans — have been captured in the corkscrew of barbed wire that runs along the top of the fence. Both pairs are turned partially inside-out, their wearers clearly having escaped and abandoned them after two aborted attempts to scale the fence, presumably followed by some desperate taxi-hailing.

It occurs to me only now that the erstwhile trouser-wearers (“Yeah, I used to wear trousers all the time but I’m trying something new.”) might not have been trying to get into Buckfast Beach in the dead of night as I first imagined but that they woke up there one morning, Crusoed and covered in dew, and had to make the bare-legged limp through the commuters and squinting in the daylight.

Today, dear diary, an impressive new batch of litter had arrived in the alley. At first I thought it was just more beer cans but I also spotted a number of baked-bean tins. I suppose it’s possible that someone out there likes to round off the night by guzzling a six-pack of Heinz, but I rather think it is someone’s recycling.

The fly-tipping of domestic refuse always catches the imagination. Who would carefully wash and sort their garbage with an eye to saving the environment only to lob the lot of it in an alley? Why, instead of using the bins provided at the back of one’s house, would anyone bother to transport and jettison a box of rinsed-and-alphabetized trash?

I see this sort of thing a lot. When I take my own recycling out, it’s not uncommon to see bags of glass bottles abandoned next to the plastics bin. So near, yet so far! It’s like the person has thought “I’ll play my part by saving all my glass but I’ll be fucked if I’m taking them to the right bin.” The best one I ever saw was a carrier of used teabags ditched next to a charity clothes bank. This particular environmentalist must have thought “I’ll just take these down to the teabag recycling bin then. Those exist. Oh no, this is for clothes! Better just leave these here then.”

The alley is strewn more generally with beer bottles, energy drink cans and miniature prosecco bottles. Few of them are ever broken and have often been placed tenderly on the ground, suggesting not angry alcoholics or off-the-leash teens but fairly regular people, perhaps on their way to a nice dinner party and seduced by the alley’s enchanting atmosphere, tanning their cargo on a deviant, out-of-character whim.

Something one might expect to see in the alley, but which I am yet to see, is a spent condom. That particular square of my Crap-Spotter’s Guide remains unstamped.

In fact, it’s been ages since I’ve seen a spent condom on the street. That’s probably a good thing really but it also suggests that al-fresco shagging is out of style, which I think is a quiet tragedy.

Reader’s voice: That’s not the only quiet tragedy around here.

Pfft. You’ll be back.

When you want to collect a package from our local postal depot, you have to wait in a room the size of a toilet cubicle.

The walls are decorated with photographs of naughty dogs who are known to have the taste for postal workers’ hands. I assume this Rogues’ Gallery is a bit like the “do not serve” photographs they keep behind the bar in some pubs. I don’t know why it’s kept on the public side of the desk, but I am not complaining. I like to look at the naughty dogs.

The queue is usually quite small and easy to understand. If there’s someone waiting at the service window, you simply stand to that person’s left. It’s intuitive.

On busier days, the queue continues around the walls so that the last person in line is actually standing to the right of the person being served. This can be a bit stressful as we all ponder what will happen if one more person should enter the tiny space before the next parcel turns up and somebody leaves. Will they squash in? Will someone take control and suggest that they wait outside? Will someone panic and take off all their clothes?

Somehow, it always works out for the best. We get through on self-organisation and blitz spirit. I usually come out of it feeling that people aren’t so bad, that perhaps there’s hope for the world after all, and that even naughty dogs are cute.

This morning though.

Ho, baby. This morning.

When I arrived at the depot with the little red summons and my photo ID, the queue was already spilling out of the door and down the ramp. I’d never seen the place so busy. With hindsight I should have gone home and come back on another day, but I didn’t want to miss a rare opportunity to witness cannibalism.

I joined the queue. In front of me was a woman in galoshes, a slightly-too-friendly man, and a sheepish-looking younger woman. Other people soon joined behind me. Occasionally, as one would hope, a person would come out of the depot with their parcel. They’d boggle at how long the queue had become.

Most locals know what it’s like inside this building — the tininess, the looping queue — so those of us outside were in no hurry to go in. It wasn’t raining and the longer we waited outside, the less crowded it would be when we got inside. If nothing else, it would give our neighbours’ farts the chance to dissipate.

I worried about the slightly-too-friendly man. He wasn’t doing anything wrong, but he had the vibe of someone who wanted to start a conversation or, ideally, a group sing-along.

He’d periodically leave the line, pop his head inside the door and come back to us with a bemused expression. Given the amount of time we could be stuck together, I decided it was best to avoid meeting his gaze.

People continued to exit the building, one by one, clutching parcels of every shape and size.

I started to think it was surely time for some of the outsiders to move inside and I was getting the vibe from the people behind me that they wanted to see some action too. It wasn’t my call though. I’d have to speak to Mr Friendly.

“How’s it looking in there?” I called.

“Fine!” he said.

“Is there space for some of us?” I asked.

“Plenty!” he said.

It became apparent that the sheepish-looking woman at the front of the outdoor queue wasn’t in the queue at all but waiting for someone else. This was why Mr Friendly kept opening the door and looking inside. He’d been trying to signal to Sheepish that she should move in. But why didn’t he just say that to her? And why didn’t Sheepface wait somewhere else? And if she really had to wait here, why didn’t she just explain to us that she wasn’t in the queue?

“Oh, for crying out loud,” said Galoshes, and she barged in, followed by Mr Friendly and me.

I thought Galoshes, after her justified chiding of Sheepo, would become an ally — someone who understood the business of queues — but I knew our relationship was doomed when we went inside and she didn’t stand behind the person who was clearly the end of the queue. She decided instead to stand to the right of the service window, immediately turning an orderly queue into a shambolic crowd. Mr Friendly didn’t seem to care and stood behind her. I, conformist nincompoop that I am, stood behind him.

Disastrously, there were now two little queues, the real one coming from the left and ours from the right.

Queuing to the right causes problems not just in that it’s counter-intuitive and confuses the next person to come in, but also because it causes the person at the end of the line to stand in front of the door, obstructing the exit and risking being belted in the spine by the metal door handle. Why had this galoshes-wearing idiot put us — put me! — in this situation?

Galoshes sighed. She couldn’t possibly think she was going to be served next could she? Hadn’t she seen the other people patiently waiting?

I wanted to share a therapeutic eye roll but nobody was willing to receive it, save for the portrait of a naughty chihuahua.

The man at the window accepted his parcel and made to leave. Galoshes, clearly understanding that she wasn’t actually in line, ushered the next person to the window. I’m glad she did this instead of barging up to the window, though I don’t know why she chose to stand in a weird place and then elect herself to the unadvertised position of Queue Director.

As he left, the man who’d been at the window issued the following terrible words — a black magic spell — to the queuing people out on the ramp: “Plenty of space inside.”

Why? Why?! Why?!?!

Nothing could have prepared us for the surge of badly-dressed flesh that would now gush through that door.

“Who’s at the end?” someone said.

It’s amazing what you can do to someone with your bare hands and a shoelace when you really have to.

One of my as-yet-unmonetized talents, along with a creditable proficiency at armpit music, is the ability to whistle quite loudly and for an insanely long time.

I don’t mean the sort of whistle that requires fingers in the mouth like the wolf whistle issued involuntarily by a retired bricklayer on hearing the clip-clop of heels on the pavement outside. No, I mean the sort of properly tuneful whistle formed only by the pursing of the lips.

“You hum it, I’ll play it,” a skilled musician might say. For me it’s more a matter of “You play it ten years ago, I’ll blow out a loud and shrill cover version when you least expect it.”

I can whistle anything that happens to be lodged in my consciousness at a given moment. Their being inane to begin with, my specialties are television theme tunes and the music from 16-bit computer games from the early ’90s. You should hear my James Pond II: Robocod. But, damn it all, I can handle anything Phillip Glass can throw at me. I can do the entirety of Einstein on the Beach — on the inhale.

I can do all eight tracks of Trane’s Blues through the gap in my front teeth. I can do Robert Fripp, Brian Eno and Scott Walker at such a pitch as to call into service as harmonizers any dogs in the vicinity. In fact, the only artist to whom I seek not to pay tribute is Roger Whittaker.

But I’m not here now to boast about the range of my whistling, merely to remark on the improbable volume of it. I can go loud.

Today, while washing up some dishes, I found myself whistling the theme from Dallas (a favourite) at a very special volume. It may have also acquired a certain resonance in the metal kitchen sink.

Somehow, Dallas evolved into a particularly horrible circa-2001 Nokia ringtone and I continued to whistle this on an extremely tight loop, in a completely demented way. It was perhaps the most annoying sound I’ve ever made with my face and I was extremely proud of it.

This is what I do behind closed doors when my wife is out, and I can’t help but feel that this information has a place somewhere in the ongoing privacy debate.

Suddenly, there was a fevered banging against the kitchen wall and a man’s voice shouting, “SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!”

It had never occurred to me, despite congratulating myself regularly on the impressive volume, that the neighbours would have been able to hear my demented whistling.

How utterly embarrassing. It’s an unzipped fly, times a million.

As borderline-millennial precariat types, we move house quite a lot, and only now does it occur to me the trail of carnage I’ve must have left in our wake.

David Emily Berkowitz, despite his success as an Andy Kaufman lookalike, was driven to madness by the simple barking of a neighbour’s dog, turning him into the Son of Sam (like how a radioactive spider turned Peter Parker into that other guy).

The “Son of Rob” serial killers I must have created with my up-to-eleven, tight-looped, double-speed renditions of “She’ll Be Comin’ ’round the Mountain” do not bear thinking about. I’ve probably made serial killers who can only kill other killers who also have killed another killer (a double Dexter), so insane are they in their need for revenge upon society.

Why did no one ever bang on the wall before? I’ve been doing this for about twenty years.

I can also do impressions through a whistle to make celebrities sound like Clangers.

I have a longstanding campaign — fought largely in private and only, it must be said, while drunk — to have France renamed “Frants” in accordance with its correct pronunciation.

“I have gone to Frants,” one might write in a note to the tax man or a loved one, “and I’m not coming back.”

As it happens, Samara and I have been hiding in Frants for the past few days. Overwhelmed by the horrors of regular life, we decided to come to Paris for a refreshing break of cafes and art museums (though it was my secret hope to get a few insane Parisians on side for my renaming-of-their-nation project).

The last time I was here, I’d set a “whole” Monday aside to visit the Louvre only to find that (a) the middle-class catchphrase that “a day really isn’t enough” is obviously true, and that (b) the Louvre and every other museum in Paris, is closed on Mondays. I spent my suddenly-free 24 hours abroad, as any devoted world traveller would, watching The Inbetweeners on DVD in the hotel room.

This time, determined not to fail so completely in front of my wife, I checked the opening hours of everything and together we plotted an itinerary in advance. We also became determined not to share the misery of the many sad-looking Japanese people in berets when we landed at Charles de Gaul only to find Paris rather damp and with an eerie, out-of-season feeling.

We chose to look on the bright side of everything being deserted. We benefited from the complete lack of a queue to get into the Musée d’Orsay and we were able to gaze upon the famous sauce for ages without being asked to move-along-please-sir.

In the same museum, we enjoyed a particularly garish collection of furniture and vases that looked like something you’d find at the home of Boycie and Marlene or possibly Saddam Hussein.

At the National Museum of Natural History, we saw a beautiful quail egg (“you can’t have it, Samara”), a pickled chimp ear (“you can’t have it, Robert”) and thousands of animal skeletons. If anything, it was too many animal skeletons.

A placard next to the skeleton of a Striped Hyena had been mistranslated as being from a Stripped Hyena, which was technically correct.

In the Saint-Germain neck of the woods, we enjoyed hot chocolates at the Cafe de Flore, presumably just like the ones Picasso used to drink; we also walked past Les Deux Magots where Sartre and de Bouvoir once chain smoked and where I like to imagine Georges Perec played pinball. The name, of course, means “The Two Maggots.” Everyone knows that.

Itinerary be damned, the highlight of the trip however was the blind luck of spotting a poster on the Metro advertising a Foujita retrospective. We love Foujita and one of our favourite books to leaf through at home is filled with photographs of him looking candidly glamorous with his beautiful outfits and his toothbrush mustache.

The show was at a far-smaller but less sleepy museum called the Maillol and we decided to go there instead of the Louvre. The show had only opened the day before our arrival so it seemed like impossibly good timing. It makes me want to be better at knowing what’s going on in the world as we almost certainly miss obscure little things like this all the time.

The Foujita show was lovingly summoned from private collections all over the world and it felt like an extremely rare opportunity. It included the chance to rifle through see some of his personal possessions. These included, as you might expect, paint brushes and tools but also a pair of mantelpiece dogs. We found it very charming that Foujita owned a pair of mantelpiece dogs. It turned out that they’d been the subjects of one of his paintings, which was also included in the show. This was quite a jarring personal connection and extremely lovely.

On our last night, we scrapped the plans we’d had for a healthy vegan meal when Samara overheard some tourists discussing a Canadian bar in which poutine was being served. Edible poutine is a rare thing to find outside Samara’s hometown of Montreal and we felt that if it could be done anywhere else it would be Paris. So our final night in Frants (if I keep slipping it in like that, it’s bound to catch on) was spent eating a delicious travesty of fries, gravy and cheese curds. Yum Yum.

*

Thanks for reading this rather-more-of-a-travelogue-than-intended diary entry. You can also see our holiday snaps with a little more commentary here. Back to sexy old normal next Saturday.

What are you supposed to do with a guest bedroom when you don’t actually have a guest in it? Just leave it alone? Come now, madam, that’s no way to milk 600 words out of nothing.

Looking for a new home in 2016, we had a ludicrous number of criteria for a rented flat to meet. After a year or so in a Thatcher-era apartment building with admittedly-delicious mushrooms growing on the walls, we longed for a properly-built Victorian tenement. It also had to be cheap, to be near to a railway station, to have taps and showers that work when (and only when) you turn them on, and to be within crawling distance of one or more of our favourite pubs.

We also dared to hope for a second bedroom to serve as a landing pad for far-flung friends, but we were prepared to forego this luxury if all the other criteria were met. They’re only friends, we thought. Fuck ’em.

Miraculously, the place we found (and now live in) actually has the long-coveted guest bedroom as well as everything else we wanted. We remain grateful to the person who was obviously murdered here before our arrival. You have kept the rent down and the competition at bay. Ta.

As international Citizens of Nowhere, we have friends and family all over the place and we felt they’d be more likely to visit us if we could promise them some privacy and a soft pillow on which to rest their travel-weary heads. In return, we’d forever have the company of our favorite folk without having to actually go anywhere.

Our sly plan was so successful that the guest bedroom is rarely unoccupied. Almost as soon as we’d moved in, Landis popped over from America and stayed for two months. Even now, I sometimes forget that he doesn’t actually live here anymore and I end up having to eat a whole second serving of “eggs-hummus-toast” (his favourite) all to myself. Please come back, Landis, I am lonely and full.

For all the joy this extra room has brought us, it presents that eternal First World Problem — how to decorate? We want to do something in there because there’s currently a subsidence crack marching down the wall that makes the San Andreas Fault look like a papercut. We also want it to be comfortable for any one of our pals but not so generic that it feels like a Premier Inn.

Unless, of course, the “Premier Inn” we’re talking about is the Overlook Hotel.

Oh yes indeedy. It may be the snow madness setting in, but I’ve been thinking about giving the room a horror-themed makeover. What do you think, reader?

I’ve found the perfect wallpaper for this caper and I’d also like to install an ominous grandfather clock and a fire-damaged Crying Boy.

I’ve even sketched out the design for a “tell-tale heart” mechanism that would not only start beating in the dead of night but also slightly raise-and-sink one of the floorboards to the beat. I got the idea from a whack-a-mole.

You might think it’s my intention with this guestroom to satirize the post-2012 Hostile Environment to Immigrants through the medium of interior design and you’d be right, but the main payoff will be the looks on our friends’ faces when I guide them, tired from the journey, into their promised sanctuary only to encounter what looks like (and is) the brainchild of a dangerous crackpot.

There is no way this is a bad idea. If our friends don’t like it and refuse to come anymore, we can at least sub-let the room through AirBNB to psychopaths who need somewhere to consummate their extra-marital affairs but who don’t want to do so without the eerie presence of fifty china dolls. It’s win-win.

Diary, I will keep you apprised.

On nights when I can’t sleep — nights like tonight — I find myself thinking about asteroids. There’s over 150 million of the fuckers up there, just hanging around and, so far as I can tell, waiting to fall on our heads.

(In case you’re curious, this doesn’t help me get to sleep. It’s just the sort of thing that drifts in while I’m counting sheep.)

In particular, I’ve been thinking lately about our old friend (35396) 1997 XF₁₁.

Remember (35396) 1997 XF₁₁? What a crazy summer! We were all chanting its name in the playground and chatting about it at the water cooler.

Wasn’t there a novelty record about it too? I rather think there was. “Oh baby, you’re sky high,” it went, “brushing against our atmosphere like a pervert on a bus. Oh, (35396) 1997 XF₁₁, usher in the sixth extinction of my heart, blacken the skies with the dusty fallout of your love.”

Or something. It wasn’t a very good song but we liked it at the time. I preferred the Mike Flowers Pops verison.

Anyway, the reason I found myself thinking about this particular asteroid is because YouTube recently nudged me into watching a news-based magazine programme from 1998 in which a comedian spoke briefly of “that asteroid that will hit the Earth in 2028”.

Hmm, I thought, it’s 2018 now so we’re almost exactly halfway through the available prep time for saving everybody’s lives.

I wondered how the project was getting along so I googled it. Imagine my dismay when the only news and science items I could find about it (once I’d waded through all the nostalgia stuff, I mean) were from 1998.

Is it possible we’ve all just forgotten about this threat to our entire planetary existence? How could this happen?

You know when you’re studying for an exam with a couple of months to spare and you keep thinking “oh, I’ve got ages to go, I’ll not worry about that yet” and then before you know it the exam’s tomorrow and all of the useful books on the subject have been taken from the library by other people? Well, do you think it’s possible that all of the scientists and astronomers and world leaders have done exactly that and put off coming up with a solution to the problem of (35396) 1997 XF₁₁ until, say, December 31st, 2027?

I think that’s exactly what’s happened.

In order to raise some awareness our pending extinction through procrastination, I think the first step is to rebrand the asteroid, perhaps changing the name to something more catchy. I mean “(35396) 1997 XF₁₁” is so 1998 and is not the sort of thing that would win the attention of the social media generation.

We may all have been doing the (35396) 1997 XF₁₁ dance in the playground and the offices in 1998 — raising the arms to signify the brackets, stretching the index fingers to the ground in celebration of the subscript ₁₁, everyone’s favourite part — but that sort of thing is just embarrassing now.

Traditionally, if not named for a string of letters and numbers, an asteroid is named after a person. The comedian who spoke about the asteroid on TV in 1998 was Stewart Lee. Luckily, he is still popular. Do you think he would consent to having a potentially Earth-ending asteroid named after him?

Frankly, time is running out and we cannot take the risk that he’ll decline the honor or coolly not show up to the naming ceremony. Someone please set up the requisite Change.org petition to have (35396) 1997 XF₁₁ renamed “Stewart Lee” and we can get on with building the necessary laser cannons. Ta.

I am writing this entry on no sleep at all. I hope it doesn’t show.

I awoke this morning — okay, fine, this afternoon — to find a Valentine’s card propped up on the dining table.

Either Samara had placed it there before leaving for work, or an especially committed, Eugene Victor Tooms-like admirer had slithered through a vent in the night and left it without disturbing either of us.

I knew it was from Samara, of course, because she had written, ominously, on the envelope TO THE OCCUPANT.

This is a reference to how, as eternally on-the-move renters, we often get letters addressed TO THE OCCUPANT shoved through our front door. The sort of properties in which we tend to live are those where the authorities have no idea who might be living there in a given week. It’s good to keep them on their toes.

It may also have had something to do with how she had to go out into the hostile, drizzly world after writing the card this morning while I would remain spectacularly ensconced in dreamyland.

I was genuinely surprised and touched to see this Valentine’s card. My wife has been extremely busy with unwanted and largely unpaid work commitments of late and also, perhaps not unrelated, has been quite ill. She had not mentioned Valentine’s Day in advance even once, so I assumed she’d forgotten about it or justifiably not been in the mood or had the time to do anything about it. I’d quietly written off the idea of observing V-Day this year, so it’s amazing and lovely that she remembered and bothered.

Luckily, I had already bought a card for her. Phew!

I’d not written in it yet, what with the sleeping ’til noon and everything so I had the opportunity to also address the envelope TO THE OCCUPANT if I so wished.

Pen in hand, I was politely tapped on the shoulder by my comedy self. My comedy self is a sort of out-of-phase ghost version of myself who is always on the alert for opportunities to say or write or do something in a funnier or wittier or at least less-obvious way to what my regular, farting, shoe-wearing, schlub self would say or write or do. Thank goodness for him. He’s what keeps me light on my feet, is the reason I’ve not been murdered by aggrieved thugs, and is presumably why my out-of-my-league wife still sends me Valentine’s cards after a decade.

Comedy Self wanted me to write, not TO THE OCCUPANT but TO THE OCCUPIED.

I saw what he was getting at. It was partly, of course, a penis-in-the-vagina joke, but it was also a post-colonial joke about how my wife is Canadian and I am British. Fuck, that’s clever isn’t it? Alas it was also largely useless as I wasn’t supposed to be writing shtick today but something private and lovely. What’s the point of you, Comedy Self?

I’ve simplified things with this explanation. Comedy Self doesn’t just tap my shoulder to present his alternative to the obvious. He kicks me hard in the backside, resulting in the instantaneous presentation of a Minority Report-style holographic interface before my eyes, upon which all comedic or at least non-trite options are displayed and await executive selection before deployment. Another option today was TO THE OCTOPOD. It was the whimsy option.

I wouldn’t normally countenance this option because it has fewer levels of meaning than TO THE OCCUPIED but, as it happens, the Valentine’s card I’d already bought had a picture of an octopus on it. I was also slightly concerned that, while I knew she’d take the OCCUPIED joke in the right spirit, it is possible that it could come up again in a non-joke way in the future. Could the unpleasant thought of being “occupied” fleet across her mind without the shield of irony one day and be the end of us? I shouldn’t be having thoughts like this on Valentine’s Day, Comedy Self! I thought you were the fun one?

I returned to the wit interface. TO THE OCUPADO was all that remained. “Ocupado,” is what you call out if you’re sitting on a public toilet in Spain and someone tries to open the door. This one made no sense whatsoever.

TO THE OCCUPIED, I wrote, and hoped for the best. If my wife dislikes the joke and says “what were you thinking?” I can at least point to this diary entry for a complete explanation. Anyway, it’s how I roll, baby — risking everything for a minor zinger. (Happy Valentine’s Day!)

I’m 35 years old but I’m constantly taken aback by the horrors of adult life.

Listen to this. A couple of weeks ago I bought a small bag of new potatoes.

Wait. It gets better.

We’re not exactly a meat-and-two-veg sort of household, so it was with a sense of ticklish nostalgia with which I bought them. New potatoes as far as I’m concerned belong in the same abandoned World War II bomb shelter as Oxo cubes and instant coffee.

In the supermarket, I’d shifted the potatoes around in my palm, getting a sense of their weight and shape as best I could through the bag. I did this partly to evoke some potato memories (Ah, Sunday Roasts, the Denim record, the Smith’s Crisps advert, Sir Walter Raleigh coming in from the docks with a mysterious bundle — whoa! too far, come back!) but also because I didn’t want get home and find I’d slipped mindlessly onto autopilot and bought a load of avocados.

Yep, they were spuds alright. Straight off the gravy-flooded plate of Henry VIII or Captain Mainwaring, except not as soil-caked as I remember potatoes being. What machine has been invented in my lifetime with the express purpose of de-soiling a potato? And how? I can’t see the Dragons going in on that. It’s got no zazz.

Today, as I cracked open the kitchen cupboard with plans to feast upon said tuberous delights, what should I find in place of my scrumptious potatoes but something that looked like it hitched a ride to Earth in the core of a meteorite?

I resisted the urge to get Professor Quatermass on the phone and searched for the use-by date. January 31st!

The potatoes had gone to seed. What had been neat little eyes when we’d first met were now sprawling across the countertop like something from The Evil Dead.

How was this possible? I thought potatoes lasted forever.

My frame of reference for this nugget of wisdom comes from playing in my Nan’s pantry as a child. There were always potatoes and carrots, unrefrigerated, in one of those wooden market boxes and this always struck me as fine. It occurs to me only now that the potatoes I encountered there each week may not have been the same potatoes.

But isn’t their longevity why people buy the bloody things? Why else could it be? It can’t possibly be for the flavour or the nutritional value. Can it? Unless curried beyond recognition, eating potatoes is barely a level up from eating acorns.

Anyway, I found the courage to handle the problem. We internationalists eat things with tentacles all the time.

It turns out the gangly, sprouting eyes are easy to slice off. It’s like giving a haircut to someone with a very small head. And then, in true English culinary fashion, you boil the living daylights out them.

They resisted the pot at first but after a little bashing with the butt-end of a crucifix, we had some lovely boiled potatoes for our dinner. Yum Yum.

Anyway, lesson learned. My Nan bought potatoes weekly. Potatoes do not last forever.

All I can say is thank God they hadn’t got as far as the bedroom. Imagine waking up with one of Cthulhu’s less-charismatic relatives clamped to your face, and having to go about the rest of your day trying to act normal.

Potatoes. What’s the point?

I swear, one of those creeping roots had a fingernail on it.

I’ve been having a frustrating time this week with taxes.

As a recidivist wastrel, filing my tax return is usually straightforward. I just pop my income and expenses into the online self-assessment thingy with one hand while eating a burrito with the other.

My earnings tend to be minuscule compared to those of normal, non-workshy people so the tax office usually ends up sending me a cheque each year for two-hundred pounds or so, presumably out of pity.

When I file, a siren goes off somewhere and besuited officials, examining the read-out, shout things like “Good God! Get this kid a rebate! Now!”

And that is how I like it.

This week, however, on conducting my annual heist, I got nasty shock. Apparently I owe them two-thousand pounds. Her Majesty’s RC is taking back everything I’ve ever taken from them, and probably more. I’ve never had a bill of this order in my entire life so it hit me like a diesel locomotive hits a medium-sized serving of chocolate profiteroles.

It turns out I’ve been making phat stacks.

“It turns out,” I call to Samara who is in the other room, perhaps anticipating debris, “that I’ve been making phat stacks.”

“Fat what?” she said.

“Stacks!” I said, “Phat stacks.”

Hah. “Fat” stacks indeed. The very thought.

“Where did you learn an expression like that?” she asked, rounding the corner, bringing a concerned expression along for the ride.

“It’s what the gangsters say,” I explained.

“Oh yes,” she said, “You’ve been watching Breaking Bad.”

Samara knows what I watch because we have the same Netflix account. I’ve been horsing Breaking Bad in five-episode sittings because I’m supposed to be writing another book, an art form best left until the last possible minute.

“No I haven’t,” I said.

Truth be told, this television programme is getting me too excited. In anticipation of next year’s tax return, my German publisher gave me an exemption form “to be signed by HMRC.” I didn’t really understand what this meant, but because of Breaking Bad my instinct was to visit the offices of HMRC, drag someone out of the building and make them dig their own grave in the desert.

I marched out full of determination but, naturally, when I got there, the approach I settled on involved gingerly approaching the security guard I found reading the Metro with his feet up on the desk, and begging to speak to “a Tax Man,” which in hindsight I realise is probably what children call them.

“You can’t do that,” he sighed as if for the hundredth time today, “It’s got to go in the post.”

I thanked him and left. The building completely failed to explode behind me.

It’s a good job it didn’t explode really, because if it had I wouldn’t have spotted the curled and sun-faded poster pinned to an information board outside explaining that HMRC had closed all of its offices to the public four years ago and that I should call an 0845 number instead.

I walked home where I kissed Samara on the cheek, dialled the number, and patiently listened to “Greensleeves” for twenty minutes, still feeling inexplicably like a tough guy.

The telephone agent told me to put the form in the post.

Phat Stacks are more trouble than they are worth.

Our local railway station must have been designed by Satan himself. Every detail has been expertly sculpted to cumulatively unhinge the once-sane commuter. It is a work of total design genius, the Mackintosh House of Hell.

At first, the station seems quite charming. There’s a bucket of flowers maintained by Friends of the Station and a wall plaque celebrating a bronze award for Scotland’s Tip-Toppest Station. It is staffed by friendly humans where most similarly-sized stations have been automated. There’s even a station cat, though he doesn’t wear a conductor’s hat like you insist on imagining.

But forget all of that. These are mere flourishes put in place by Beelzebub to disarm you before the madness of his black design takes hold of your skull.

I’ve been taking more trains than usual — often during rush hour — and experiencing the station from the perspective of a commuter for the first time. It makes me want to set up some sort of commuter’s union. The poor bastards have difficult enough lives as it is, without starting each day in a Jean-Paul Sartre play.

Any train you care to name is guaranteed to be late — by three minutes. It is so inevitable that I wonder why they don’t simply adjust the timetables to account for it.

Each delay is accompanied by an automated announcement over the PA system to inform us that “we are sorry to announce that the eight oh eight to Dalmuir is delayed by approximately three minutes. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.” Given that every single train is late and will continue to be late forever, I don’t think this is necessary. We take it for granted. Moreover, as arrivals to this station are so frequent, the announcements form a chain, an endlessly repetitive reminder that you should have learned to drive.

There is a set of double doors to enter the vestibule where the ticket kiosk dwells. A sign describes the doors as “automatic” but they are merely electric. To open them, you must push a button intended for wheelchair users and then they slowly, slowly, ever-so-slowly open in a theatrical “open sesame!” way as if they should reveal a Georges Méliès wonderland rather than a few chairs and some tourist information leaflets. They also close quite forcibly on their own (ah, so they are automatic) cutting the patiently-waiting ticket queue in half.

Most maddening of all — I have saved the best ’til last — are the information screens. Ah yes, the screens.

There are two little screens, one to describe arrivals and departures for Platform 1 and one to do the same for Platform 2. The screens are quite small, capable of displaying perhaps ten short rows of digital text.

The only information a commuter wants to see on these screens is (1) the terminus and station stops of the next train to depart the platform and (2) the arrival times and destinations of perhaps the next five trains. That is all. Instead, it gives us superfluous information about trains arriving at the other platform and various “special announcements” that really aren’t special at all.

These special announcements are either highly generic (reminders not to leave baggage unattended) or ludicrously specific (the elevator at Exhibition Centre is out of order) and not relevant to anyone at this particular moment.

Inevitably, you arrive at the station to find a train whose body language suggests it is ready to leave. You want to know immediately if it’s your scheduled train to work, or some other delayed train — perhaps a non-stop scenic service to John o’Groats.

But instead, all the screen tells you is that you must inform the Transport Police if you see anything unusual (like a train that actually leaves on time, perhaps?) and that this notice is “screen 6/8.” You just know that by the time the information you so pressingly need rolls around, your train to work — crammed with colleagues clutching their Andy McNabs — will be a dot on the horizon.

Is it so unlikely that there’s a CCTV booth somewhere, staffed by two Scotrail demons who, like the Sun and Wind of the Aesop’s Fable, compete with one another to see how many commuters they can convince down onto the tracks? I am certain of it.

After an unusually busy day working in the capital, I scurry to the National Museum of Scotland to meet my wife and her parents. My in-laws are visiting us from Canada and today had been their Edinburgh day.

By the time I reached them, they’d already seen my favorite items in the museum — the robot who can spell my wife’s name, the Millennium Clock Tower and the Sheep Rotator — so I had to make do with my memories of these particular treasures.

I asked what the family had thought of these treasures and while the Clock Tower had strangely failed to chime on the hour and the spelling robot had been broken (I asked if its blocks had said “out of order” or “help me!” but apparently they had not) but the blockbuster Sheep Rotator was an all-round hit. If only every museum could have a copy of that sheep.

They also spoke enthusiastically of an interactive section of the museum in which they’d learned that my wife can hit the bell on a Strength-o-Meter (not surprising to me, that one) and that they’d all “kicked ass” on some sort of reaction test.

This sounded like precisely the sort of competitive, sportiness I cannot oblige. How typical of my sporty, air-punching, New World family to find such a monstrosity in a place of art and natural history! It slowly dawned on me, however, what, in essence, this so-called reaction test was:

I am not competitive about much in life, dear reader, but I really must defend my honor when it comes to Whack-a-Mole.

The machine was built into a wall with 20 or so touch-sensitive pads. A pad would illuminate soundlessly at random and you’d have to slap it with the palm of your hand before moving to the next one, wherever it might appear.

There were some small Dutch children playing the game when we arrived, so I stood slightly too close in the hopes of intimidating them into leaving. One of their parents came over and said they they should “let the man have a turn”. You’d be surprised how often I hear that expression.

Somehow I stifled my desire to say, “Yes, let the man have a turn. At Whack-a-Mole. He will CRUSH YOU TO DUST,” and instead I said, “It’s okay, you can carry on.”

But the sweet little boy and girl allowed the man to have a turn.

I noticed that the little girl’s score had been a rather childish 17. My family’s high score, meanwhile, was a more respectable 31. Soon, I would feast on their bones.

At first I found it quite difficult. The lack of sound meant less information to work with (some Whack-a-Mole machines have moles that taunt you with little “whee!” and “nah-nah!” noises, but it is TO THEIR DETRIMENT) and the size of the machine meant that some of the pads were outside of your field of vision when they lit up.

But I need not have feared. It seemed like I’d barely started when I heard my father-in-law, somewhere in the distance, saying “You’ve done it, Rob,” in the sort of tone normally heard outside rough London pubs when girlfriends say “He’s not worth it, Les.”

But I was not about to stop. I skittered all over the museum tiles like a Praying Mantis at his first ever pick-n-mix, slapping that wall into the middle of next week.

The timer buzzed and the digital display declared a score of 37. “Yeah!” I said, spinning on my heels and showing off my winning palms in an “it’s showtime!” jazz-hands sort of way.

My family didn’t look particularly impressed so I turned to the Dutch children and said, “Have you ever seen a grown up behave like that?” but I said it in a way that clearly meant “Don’t fuck with me, bitches” and gave the impression of forcing a lit cigarette into my own arm — and I think the message was received.

We went off to look at the Christopher Dresser teapots in silence and I had to hide that I was PUMPED.

Enjoying some time in bed with the sniffles, I decide to sign up to Netflix — or “Net Flicks” as I naively thought it was called until today. When did I get so old? Why can’t we live forever?

A universally popular TV-streaming service, I think, probably beats staring at the formation of cracks in our ceiling that some say looks like Sir Roger Moore and others say looks like a knackered bedroom ceiling.

Besides, I must admit to harboring a degree of curiosity about this thing everyone’s talking about. First time for everything, I suppose.

I’ve resisted Netflix for some time, in part because it’s one of the things contributing to the BBC’s redundancy and I hate to think of Messrs Attenburgh, Castle and Blobby not having anything to do anymore.

But it’s a tad hypocritical to worry so much about the Beeb when I don’t actually give them any money, isn’t it? The TV license, you may not know, can be avoided when you exploit the simple loophole of slinging the telly out of the window. Just make sure it’s not going to fall through the roof of a detector van before you push it off the ledge.

Anyway, what strikes me first and foremost about Netflix is its uncannny resemblance to the in-flight entertainment systems you get on airplanes.

The main comparison lies in how, despite there being a bewildering range of programming on offer, it never has quite what you want — presumably because the aim of whomever curates programming for each of these cloud-based services is to mollify a bored, anxious, probably grounded, international audience.

The effect is that you sit in your own stench, contemplating the likelihood of a pending fiery death, wile fingering a just-about-responsive interface composed of colourful, twerp-proof Whytech buttons. Yes, it feels very much like something that should be stuck in the back of another passenger’s reclined, dandruffy head.

You ask it to show you The X Files which can’t be done but, God bless it for trying, you can have any one of seventeen other things with David Duchovney instead.

You try to browse the comedy section but you end up viewing the first 13 seconds of something called Mindhunter thanks to a slow-loading banner ad.

Beyond a huge number of expensive-looking superhero- and monarchy-based exclusives is what can only be described as “an abyss of tat.” Firmly in this category is an awful lot of old BBC content. Obviously Netflix will have paid the BBC some money to show these programmes but I wonder if the The Big British Castle also receive royalties after a certain number of viewings? I don’t know for sure, but this is what happens with books — you get a certain amount up front and then a percentage after selling, say, 10,000 copies. Or so my publishers assure me.

This gives me an idea. Could we not rescue the BBC from its funding crisis by leaving old episodes of Blackadder playing from beginning to end when we all go out to work? You’d leave in the morning with Brian Blessed on the screen and come home in the evening to the fate of Speckled Jim. Meanwhile you’ve made 20p for the BBC. If everyone did this, Aunty would be rolling in pence.

Better still, we should choose to play old episodes of Bottom, just so the campaign can be called “Bottoming”. That is, #Bottoming.

Part way through an episode of an alienating, joyless cash-in called Star Trek: Discovery, I find myself wondering which is the button that will tell me the time remaining until our destination.

Might go back to staring at those ceiling cracks.

Friday night and my arm is worn out. Not for the reason you’re thinking of (honestly, madam, where do you get it from?) but because I’ve been writing a letter.

Yes, a proper, long-form letter with an old-fashioned pen and paper. Two sides of A4 if you must know (and you must).

A friend wants to keep in touch by writing letters and who am I to deny him this archaic pleasure? If it weren’t for the distraction, he’d only roam the halls of his family seat, bellowing in his pantaloons and wistfully playing the lute.

Besides, letter-writing turns out to be good clean fun and I certainly hope to continue the practice for a while. I mean, it took me so long to find a pen, I’m invested now.

The pen turned out to be hiding in some sort of “case” along with a few coloured pencils, a half-moon-shaped piece of plastic, and one of those devices for stabbing other children in the back of the hand. It’s amazing to think that schools once asked us to maintain such kits of bizarre and sadistic gadgetry but there must have been some reason for it all.

Acceptable writing paper took time to excavate too. I genuinely considered tearing up a cereal packet into squares. Alas, we don’t have an empty one at the moment, and having to eat six bowls of Sugar Puffs in order to write a letter quickly put paid to the idea. Besides, my friend had already set a high standard by writing to me on such nice-quality paper with his home address embossed along the top that it did not seem adequate to reply using a jigsaw puzzle of the Honey Monster’s face.

I eventually found — between some fossilized layers of gas bill — a single sheet of A4 printer paper, probably half-inched from some office job of yore. Come to think of it, what do people steal from work these days to make it worth going in? Bandwidth?

When it finally came to writing the letter, I’ve not had so much physical activity in years. Up and down the pen-strokes go, across and around, dotting and looping. You must avoid the temptation to put down so many exclamation marks, just because the motions inspired by their shape is so appealing. It’s worth reserving such punctuation for phrases like “send help!” or “trapped in a drain!” if you want them to have conviction.

And then you have to tear it all up and start again because you’ve drifted off and written “cockholes” instead of “dear friend” or because you’ve crossed out too many misfires and the pen has leaked and you’ve knocked your glass of water over it.

But just six hours and two small fires later, and you have a beautiful, hand-written letter replete with meaning and personal confidence. It’s a shame the diagonal slant promoted by sitting at a table for once makes everything radiate from the top left-hand corner like an upside-down version of the explosive symbol.

It takes you back, writing a letter. You remember all manner of things — checking the dictionary before committing a word to print; putting the address in the “correct” corner; taking letters dictated by parents and teachers, mischievously including the interjections of passing strangers and pets.

Remember all of the rules like the requisite number of blank lines between date and address, and ending with “Yours Faithfully” if you began with “Dear Sir”? Today, as you know, it’s perfectly acceptable to start an email to a parent or employer with “Alright, Cunt?!?!”

And now, as I seal my masterpiece into the envelope — what better way to end a respectful epistle than with the application of saliva? — my arm is like that of the false Rod Hull. I’ve always had skinny, string-like arms but after writing the letter I fear my limbs will now only move again with the application of Kermit the Frog-style rods.

Off I go now to the Post Box. Hey, remember when we had to put one of those sticky “Queen’s head” things onto the envelope before posting it? Crazy days!

Every now and then, something from my working-class childhood floats up in memory to give me a shudder. The Nit Nurse, for example, or a scene glimpsed through a Blackpool window in 1993.

And then there’s Athlete’s Foot. Whatever happened to it? The 1980s was a golden age for Athlete’s Foot, a festive dusting of Tinaderm on the rim of every toilet bowl. Today? It is gone. I’m reminded of Richard Dawkins saying that “to allow a species to fall into extinction is to will the destruction of a masterpiece.”

Admittedly, Dickie may not have been thinking of Athlete’s Foot when he said that, if indeed he ever said it at all (which he didn’t), but it would be disingenuous for a biologist of his stature to so adore, say, the mountain gorilla and not our old friend tinea pedis, as I’d call it in said working class childhood.

“My tinea pedis, mater,” I’d exclaim in a broad Dudley accent, aggressively rubbing my de-socked feet against the rough edges of the Dudley skirting boards, “Ubi dolor, ibi digitus,” to which mother would inevitably respond “I’ll give you ubi dolor, ibi digitus ’round the head in a minute.”

But Athlete’s Foot is not what I sat down to tell you about today, loyal reader. No! That particular blast of nostalgia was merely the warm-up. What I’d meant to raise today is the strange case of the washed neck.

What was the grownups’ obsession in our childhoods with washing our necks? “Go to the bathroom,” they’d say, “and wash your neck.” I was forever being sent to the bathroom to wash my neck. The hours lost to it are probably why I never took the piano beyond Three Blind Mice.

Why the neck? Why not a traditionally smelly area like the armpit or, in my strange case, the arnus? Why not the hands, forever touching grubby surfaces and coving orifices as they do? Why not the fungus-addled feet? Or why not, simply, one’s whole self?

It was a long time ago, I suppose. Perhaps in those days they thought a clean neck kept draclias away (draclias being what we called Vampires in the British Midlands — not to be confused with Dracula who was simply a draclia who happened to be in the public eye). But if that was the case, why not pop a little clove oil behind each earlobe while you’re at it? And surely a clean neck could only make you more tempting to creatures of the night. Perhaps, then, it was a courtesy to the draclias. We knew our place.

Perhaps neck-washing was a sacred ritual to the British working classes and its significance was never explained to me. The human neck, if I remember my anatomy lessons correctly, is what keeps the human body attached to the human head (or your head attached to your body if you’re a pessimist, or your head attached to someone else’s body if you’re a surrealist, etc.) but beyond that I’m not sure of the significance of frequent localized neck cleansing.

Perhaps “wash your neck” was an aspirational expression, borrowed from a more arisocratic class who’d be understandably proud of a highly-buffed neck — a comforting, almost satirical superstition developed through their residual fear of the chopping block.

On the other hand, maybe it was a euphemism I failed to pick up on. Did “wash your neck” somehow mean “have a shit” or “tap one out”? Or! Perhaps it was a secret code between parents — a bit of predetermined patoir for “let’s get rid of the kid so we can get it on (i.e. neck)” perhaps?

Wait. I think I’ve got it. If we recall that “neck” sometimes meant “a brazen attitude” as in “a brass neck” or “the neck of hell,” perhaps “wash your neck” simply meant “reign it in, lad,” in a similar way to how “wash your mouth out with soap and water” was a response to swearing. If this is the case, then I spent far too much time in the bathroom taking the request literally. My poor parents. That poor, bald flannel.

I found myself thinking today about Luke.

You remember Luke. He was the chap who, when I was on work experience at the council, occupied a corner office designed to segregate him from the others lest he distract them with his exquisite beauty.

He was the one who taught me how to skive by playing Minesweeper with some invoices beside me in case someone came in.

Anyway, for the first few days of my work experience week, I thought Luke was it. We had a connection, I thought. He’d give me knowing winks. He once had me in hysterics when he breezed through the main office, singing “have a banana.”

For all this admiration, I knew we were very, very different. He was a man’s man. I was a boy. And not even a boy’s one.

He once said “Hello Fruity,” to one of the receptionists and she seemed genuinely charmed by it. I’d never be able to say “Hello Fruity.”

If I ever said “Hello Fruity,” my name would be taken down. Rightly.

It was 1998 and one of the things Luke and I both loved was South Park. South Park was huge and I had a squishy plastic Kenny on my key chain. Luke was thrilled when he saw it. He unfastened his suit jacket and showed me his Mr Garrison necktie. It was brilliant.

During my work experience, the long-awaited second series had just started to air. I watched it at home one night and came dashing into work, excited to see Luke. “Did you see it?” I asked him, panting.

“Yeah!” he said with shared enthusiasm, “the baby went up in her head! Ew!”

And we laughed.

But something was wrong. The baby hadn’t “gone up in her head,” it was a conjoined twin. That was the whole point. Conjoined Twin Myslexia. It was practically a catch phrase, repeated and repeated throughout the whole episode. I can still remember it, eighteen years later. Conjoined Twin Myslexia!

He hadn’t understood it. I’d met my first grown-up idiot.

I mean, I already knew my parents were cultural philistines but all that meant was they weren’t interested in South Park so they didn’t watch it. This was “stupid” but I’m certain they’d have understood what they were watching had they done so. There was a difference. Luke had sat on a sofa beneath three homely wall-mounted flying ducks, watching his favourite television programme, not understanding it. But he’d laughed.

So that’s why he had the corner office.

On my last day, I went with Luke on a routine inspection of council houses. In one, the tenant had blu-tacked some pages from a pornographic magazine onto the walls.

“Oy-oy,” said Luke, and made an obnoxious vaginal suction-sound between his tongue and lower lip.

I occasionally make that noise when I think nobody’s there to hear it.

The customs officers at JFK do not take kindly to flouncers, flaneurs or fops.

If you ask me, they’ve had it in for us since Wilde’s “nothing to declare” jibe, or “Geniusgate” as they call it now.

Back 2009, I was rather full of myself. I’d been recognised a couple of times as a comedian, I was flying around in Europe and North America simply for fun, and I was sleeping with people with full sets of teeth for the first time in my life. I thought I was it.

None of this held any weight at JFK Security.

“Hello!” I said.

I’d flown in from Montreal where I’d been romancing the lady who’d eventually become my wife and was now off to New York to romance someone else entirely. It was, as they say, the business.

“What is your business in New York City?” said the customs official.

“Well,” I said. “I suppose you could say I’m here for pleasure.”

“Pleasure?” she growled.

“Yes,” I said, wiggling my eyebrows left, right and impossibly centre.

“What is your profession please?” she said.

“A bit of this,” I said, “a bit of that.”

“Some kind of comedian, sir?”

“Yes!” I said, delighted, “though between you and me I’d be more happily placed in the feuilletons of a decent broadsheet than the stage.”

She eyeballed me over the top of her glasses in exactly the way as a careers adviser would.

“What is your address in New York City?”

“I don’t have an address in New York City,” I said, fingering the unicorn on the passport, “I live in Great Britain.”

“Yes,” she said, “I can see that. But what at what address will you be residing while in New York City.”

“Gosh,” I said, “I have no idea. I’m just meeting my friend at Grand Central in about forty minutes from now. At an Oyster Bar apparently. You don’t happen to know it do you?”

The officer stood up. She was short but impressively wide.

I noticed for the first time that we were both wearing blue gloves, mine alpaca and hers rubber, but almost certainly for different reasons. Well, not entirely different reasons and we’d both probably end up thinking of England. But it all comes down to motivation.

“Sir,” she said, “You must have an address if you’re to enter New York City.”

Today, of course, I’m a far wiser traveller. I always know the address of where I’m staying and, if for some reason I don’t, I could make one up. I could simply have said “I’m staying at the Waldorf Astoria” and slipped unhindered through the barriers like a swamp adder through the bedroom duct of an unwanted heir.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t have the exact address with me. I’m staying in the Bronx, I think. Is Chinatown in the Bronx?”

“That’s no good. What if we need to contact you?” she said.

“What if who needs to contact me?” I asked.

“The TSA,” she said.

“Who’s that?” I said.

“That’s us,” she said tapping the insignia on her breast pocket, “the Transportation and Security Administration.”

“Frankly,” I said in all innocence, “that eventuality had never occurred to me.”

Ah yes. I’d got her on the ropes alright. This is probably why she huffily prodded some computer keys and said, “I’m putting a note on your record. Make sure you have an address next time.”

I suspect this was bluff as no customs officer in the meantime has referred to this “note” on my “record”. But it’s quite exciting to think that the TSA care so much about staying in touch.

I unhooked Enrique, my umbrella, from her Plexiglas sneeze guard-thing and settled back into the mood for oysters.